A spot to highlight my Triton sailboat, her sailing adventures and restoration challenges. For those of you smart enough to run from a total 'gut-job' restoration but like to follow the miseries of those less wise, I hope I can provide you with some entertainment.

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The weather has not been good for priming or sanding so I have been keeping busy with some low priority items. Actually, it is about all I can do at the moment. I would rather be working on stuff critical to launching next spring but I can't until the topcoat is on. So until I get that done I have been filling my time with some boring but necessary interior work. At least I can entertain the possibility of having the basic interior layout built when I launch next spring. That will be nice.

First though, I promised a picture looking at the aft cabin 'bulkhead' from the cockpit side. This is looking through the port battery access hatch hole in the cockpit. You can see the engine exhaust and part of the battery shelf. I thought I had more storage area under here until I closed it in...

Okay, so then I attached some pieces that the interior panels will connect to. The pieces also will support the aft end of the galley table. Crude but effective. Then I cut out sections of the Armacell foam insulation I am using and bonded them to the panel with contact cement.

I bonded the insulation to the areas behind the settee backs too.

Then I added some foil backed 'bubble insulation' to the mix.

To be honest, I really don't know if this stuff is helping me. However I did it for the following reasons.

1.) it can't hurt.

2.) it is cheap and it was lying around taking up space in my cellar. I don't want to store this stuff forever.

3.) it should at least improve my radar signature slightly.

4.) it might actually reflect radiant heat from outside.

Quick lecture warning:

From my research into my icebox contruction... heat travels in two ways. By conduction, that is by contact, and by radiation, i.e. infrared radiation. The foam will handle the heating from conduction. The foil might block the radiant heat energy from the sun. It might. On a more positive note, it will most likely reflect the radiant heat coming from my solid fuel heater. One of the nice things about wood heat is that it radiates as well as conducts. That is, it releases infrared radiation and makes all the furniture and walls in the room heat up even before the air heats up. So my thinking is that the foil should reflect the heat from the stove and help make it more efficient. Like I said, it might work. It was there and I put it to use.

So then I went ahead and made the interior backing panels. On the aft end I only did the portion under the galley table. I still need to figure out how I am going to finish out the visible portions above.

The panels were trickier than I imagined. Nothing is square on a boat and that took some work. And then the hull curvature changes constantly so the panels don't lie on the same plane all the way along. They twist a bit. It was also a mistake to put all the fiddles in before the panels. Some of the panels fit quite tightly and the extra fiddles for the settee fronts and tops made it that much more difficult to work around. I had to bend the panels quite a bit to get them into place. And most of the time I had to remove them and shave a bit off several times before I got the fit right. As it turns out, after I started securing them with screws into the backing blocks I had installed previously, they continued to twist into position making the fit along the edges worse. I am also not that happy with how strong four screws in the corners are (considering the pressure they are under from the flexing plywood) so I am going to add some support by laying in some fiberglass tape on side edges. That will also help keep moisture out too I suppose.

I finished today with some expanding foam in a few nooks and crannies where a few gaps appeared. I couldn't epoxy directly over the wet foam so I called it quits for the day.

I haven't sorted it all out yet but my plan is to use the forward starboard section as a bin for storing fuel for the stove. The middle section for general storage, most likely food, wine, dishes, etc. The aft starboard section will house my trash bin.

On the port side, the three sections will all be for general storage. The aft section will be partially obstructed by the galley table which I will be extending out to match the starboard side. I might make that a bin as well. I could store my hatch boards and such. I don't know yet.

Weather, job searching, odd jobs to supplement the meager unemployment checks and other life stuff continue to challege my productivity on the boat. On a good note, the paint has been ordered, should be here today actually, and the final topcoat is scheduled for the first week of September. The ball is still moving forward. Just not as quick as I would like.

7 comments:

It's really the opposite. You can't move forward on the "real" work without these important bones in place, so while the work may be less interesting and satisfying than some jobs, it's extremely important in the scheme of things--and necessary to keep the work moving forward (which is the prime directive, really).

Those of us who have done this sort of tedium in the past know exactly how time-consuming, frustrating, and important the behind-the-scenes initial jobs are.

Those of you who haven't yet approached a project of this magnitude--but who may be thinking about it--should pay attention to get an idea just how unglamorous and time-consuming the most basic work can be.

Yet it all has to be done...this is the stuff that people never think about when dreaming up their project boats, and this is where project after project comes to ultimate failure. Keeping the motivation level up during the "boring" work is the hard part.

I should clarify that I use the term 'low priority' to mean 'stuff that doesn't need to be complete to launch next spring'. It all has to get done eventually and while it isn't much fun, it does make up the bulk of the job.

I knew I was in for a big project. I had no idea how big, 'BIG', can be...